It is expected that nearly 1.5 billion chicken wings will be consumed during the Super Bowl weekend.
Let’s take a closer look at the miserable life of each of these 750 million victims.

The Suffering Begins At Birth

None of these hundreds of millions of chicks will ever experience maternal care. Under natural conditions the mother hen is fiercely protective of her chicks, sheltering them under her wings for their first months of life. In the chickens flesh industry, a few hours-old chicks are thrown into prisons. Motherless from day one, the chicks must fend for themselves in huge windowless sheds with up to 100,000 other birds. Humans have broken their ties with their own mothers and their natural environment.

Under natural conditions, chickens live in complex social structure and have complex communication. They spend about 50% of their time foraging for food and have strong sense of personal space. But in the sheds, the chicks are denied any normal social structure, adequate resting periods, the opportunity to dust bath, the ability to forage, fresh air, sunshine, natural diet and space.

As the birds grow, the space for each individual decreases. At some point each bird has only 20x20cm of floor so they must push their way through a solid mass of other chickens to reach food and water points. Many are left starved.

Violent Body Invasion

Humans severely cripple billions of sentient beings every year for the sake of maximum flesh in minimum time. Today’s meat chickens have been genetically altered to grow three times faster and three times larger than their ancestors. Pushed beyond their biological limits hundreds of millions don’t even reach 6 weeks of age which is when the whole flock is slaughtered.

Naturally chicks reach maturity at 18 weeks of age, when they weigh less than 1kg (2.2lb). A human child reaches maturity at 18 years of age weighing about 60kg. By 1976, exploited chickens reached 1kg just after 6 weeks rather than 18. So picture, for comparison, not an eighteen-year-old but a six-year-old child weighing about 60kg.
Today, because of the intensive selective breeding by the chickens industry in the past 25 years, the six-week-old chicken weighs up to 2.6kg.

Picture a six-year-old child weighting 156kg. Terrifying!
Now try to imagine this child walk. Hideous and cruel for a child, but a reality for a six weeks old chick.

Tibial Dyschondroplasia (TD)

Forced to grow three times faster than normal chickens through dietary, lighting and mainly genetic manipulations, the chicks suffer from painful skeletal and metabolic diseases. One of the harshest is Tibial Dyschondroplasia (TD), in which the young leg bones of the growing birds develop crippling fissures and fractures.
The combination of forced rapid growth and excessive weight causes chronic, painful lameness and abnormal posture. The bird’s body grows too fast for the bone plates to accommodate. Consequently, the birds develop angular bone deformities and Spondylolisthesis (“kinky back”), in which the vertebra snaps and puts pressure on the spinal cord, causing paralysis. The birds can only move by using their wings for balance.

Several decades ago, 1.2% of chickens suffered from Tibial Dyschondroplasia. Today, 50% of the chickens suffer from this human-created disease.

In addition to TD, studies have shown that 90% of birds have a detectable abnormality in their gait. Other pathological leg conditions which have been found in chickens are: Rotated Tibia, Rickets, Angular Bone Deformity and Chondrodystrophy (“slipped tendons”).

Sick Lives

Though they live only a few weeks, the chicks suffer old-age illnesses such as heart attacks, as their hearts and lungs are unable to keep up with the fast growth of their body muscles.

The strain on their cardiovascular system is enormous, causing “congestive heart failure” which causes ascites ­- pooling of blood fluids in the abdomen.
The high oxygen demand of rapid growth in the modern chicken combined with restricted space for blood, which flows through the capillaries of the lung, results in an internal accumulation of yellow or blood-stained fluid in the abdomen.
Cardiac arrhythmias have been found in chickens as young as 7 days of age!

The faster a bird grows the higher the incidence of leg problems. The birds spend 40% less time walking because of legs weakness and chronic pain.
Humans severely disable billions every year to squeeze a few more cents out of the soar body of each “little money unit”.

The unnatural growth rate of chickens combined with the lack of space to move or exercise, force the birds to rest on the wet, dirty, ammonia-ridden litter. This leads to painful breast blisters and hock burns. Foot and breast lesions and ulcerations are also frequent.

The health problems of the chickens are so severe that if they were allowed to live on, instead of being slaughtered at 6 weeks, most would die before reaching the age of puberty, at 18 weeks.

Chronic Hunger

The chicken industry has virtually bred animals which are simply not viable. They are unable to reach adulthood because of the related problems of crippling leg and heart diseases.
Generally, it doesn’t concern the industry, because the vast majority of the birds will be slaughtered before reaching adulthood. But the industry is in a bind, some of the birds must reach adulthood to be the breeder flocks, those that are to produce the future generations. These birds must not only survive, but also remain sufficiently healthy to breed.

If these chickens were fed normally, most would die before puberty and the survivors would suffer from reduced fertility. To avoid this, the industry has to find a way of slowing down the fast growth rates of the breeders (growth rates which have been imposed on the breeders to ensure that their offspring put on weight as quickly as possible). The industry’s “solution” is to feed breeders severely restricted rations – in some cases, just 25% – 50% of what they would eat if given free access to food. Chickens in the breeding flock are chronically hungry, frustrated and stressed. The birds are highly motivated to eat all the time and display abnormal forms of oral behaviour such as stereotyped pecking at non-food objects and excessive preening. They are literally going mad of hunger.

And despite the severely restricted rations, male breeders still experience chronic orthopaedic problems, which cause chronic pain.

Dimmed Lives

The effort to make more and more money over the chicks broken and deformed body, leads to various manipulations. One example regards the lighting. Artificial lighting in the chicken sheds is carefully controlled. Initially, lighting is bright to accustom the chicks to the location of food and water and encourage maximum eating and rapid growth. This lighting is then dimmed (to a level of 2-5 lux) in order to discourage aggression and fighting between chickens. The chickens endure a gloomy lighting all day long.

Filthy Lives

Farmers usually rear five or six batches of chickens a year. Two or three weeks are needed between batches to allow the sheds to be fumigated and cleared of the litter. The litter is not changed or cleaned, during the chickens’ time in the shed, and so becomes increasingly wet and greasy and covered with the bird’s faeces. It is estimated that 80% of the litter by weight consists of faeces by the time of slaughter. Stress and disease are inevitable under these conditions. Strong ammonia fumes can lead to Keratocon-Junctivitis, a painful eye condition leading to blindness. Heart attacks, chronic respiratory disease, kidney syndrome, a wide range of bacterial and viral infections lead to high mortality amongst flocks.

The Brutal End

Their last day is probably the most traumatic one. The chickens are violently grabbed while asleep, in the middle of the night, by humans who are yelling at them while pitching and stuffing them into the crates, in which they will be transported to the next stage of human atrocity – the slaughterhouse.

Teams of catchers “depopulate” the sheds as quickly as possible, carrying four or more birds upside down in each hand. The chickens are held by just one leg. Their well-being is of little importance as the catchers “must” yield 400-500 chickens per hour. This brutal process is referred to by the industry as “harvesting”.

As a result of the brutal yanking of chickens from their prisons to the transportation trucks, their hips are often dislocated, causing immense pain.

During the journey the birds experience sudden jolting movements, vibration, loud noises, deprivation of food and water and overcrowding. The birds also suffer extreme cold or heat and high levels of humidity especially due to trucks’ bad ventilation. All contribute to the already inconceivable stress and horror.

Long delays can occur between arrival at the slaughterhouse and unloading. This intensifies the stress imposed by the transport. These delays occur when birds arrive too late to the slaughterhouse. They are then left in the containers on the lorry to be slaughtered on the next day. In many cases these delays are accompanied by poor weather conditions, such as extreme heat or cold.

Once they arrive to the murder factory, the chickens that survived so far are yanked from the crates and shackled onto a conveyor belt by their feet, while still alive.

In cases that the bird’s legs are too big for the shackles, the workers break them to fit them in.

The conveyor carries them into the slaying room where their heads pass through an electrified water bath intended to stun them. As they pass along further, an automatic knife cuts their throat, and then they proceed into a scalding tank to loosen their feathers before plucking. Unfortunately some birds miss the electrified water bath and are therefore still fully conscious when they reach the automatic knife. Some birds may also miss the knife and are then lowered into the 50-degrees scalding tank while still alive. Some regain consciousness inside the scalding tank, which means that they will be conscious when the plucking knives tear their bodies.

What emphasizes speciesism and humans’ alienation more than anything, is the farming regulation – “40 kilogram per meter”.
One expression that unfortunately describes the relationship between human and nonhuman animals, in the most accurate way.

This relationship is devastating to all nonhuman animals. To more than 150 billion animals per year.
This relationship has got to end.